School Taught You to Study, Not to Learn - Here’s Why You’re Stuck and How to Fix It

Many people struggle to progress because they don't know how to learn. They think the process of learning should be automatic.

They pronounce the words from a book inside their head. Then wonder why their lives hasn't changed or their grades aren't going up.

It keeps people stuck in the same place, even though they might be working hard.

If you're frustrated with your own growth, it is not a lack of ability but a lack of understanding of how to learn.

Meaning of Learning

Let’s break this down. Intelligence isn’t about innate ability—it’s about behavior. The behaviors you engage in are what determine your success. Instead of thinking of intelligence as a set of traits, consider it as a set of behaviors you can cultivate.

• Patience is a behavior.

• Focus is a behavior.

• Discipline is a behavior.

• Intelligence is a behavior.

  
  

Intelligence is the rate of learning.

Learning means "Same condition, new behavior."

Intelligence means rate of learning. If you want to be a smart cookie, decrease how many times you are exposed to the same condition before you change your behavior. Or increase the number of conditions you’re exposed to per unit time. Ideally, do both.

You can read anything or watch 200 YouTube videos on how to do the thing. If you're not making any behavioral attempts on doing the thing, you're not learning. You're entertaining yourself, and you're not as intelligent as you think.

The true test of intelligence is getting what you want out of life.

Every trait you desire can be developed through the right actions. This opens the door to purposeful and accelerated growth. Your frustration with learning is common and natural.

Don’t blame anyone because of how hard it is; we’ve all experienced it ourselves. Don’t lie, you’ve been in a domain where you found beginners annoying because you have a higher level of expertise.

If you haven't, well, sucks to be you.

In this article, I'll explain the various frustrations that go with learning. I'll explore how to advance your skills and knowledge.

Learning is changing your behavior. There are certain behaviors that are stopping you from changing your behavior.

Some of those behaviors holding you back, you got them from school:

1. One Correct Answer

Schools teach convergent thinking: one problem, one solution. Real life demands divergent thinking: one problem, infinite solutions. Creativity thrives not in finding the "correct" answer but in exploring new possibilities.

For example, convergent thinking insists 1 + 1 = 2, and there’s only one method to solve it. If you solve it another way, you’re “wrong.” This rigidity is absurd.

Alex Hormozi, in his book $100M Offers, asks, “How many ways can you use a brick?” You could build a wall, create a paperweight, design art, or even invent something new. These are abundant examples of divergent thinking. There are several “right” answers, and some are more right than others. That's how the real world works.

When solutions are convergent, they’re easier to teach and easier to replace. If someone can teach you, they can teach someone else—or program a computer or robot to do the same thing. Divergent thinking happens with creativity, making it irreplaceable.

2. No Shortcuts

Have you ever solved a math problem your way only to fail because it wasn’t the way your teacher wanted? Me too.

Traditional schools discourage shortcuts. They insist on “doing it the hard way” under the false pretense that you’ll learn more. But you don’t need to learn everything—you only need to learn what’s useful.

The truth is, no one succeeds alone. A pencil is the product of thousands of people working together. Woodcutters, miners, rubber producers, and manufacturers who’ve never met.

Schools lament that younger generations use calculators, computers, and now AI tools. But isn’t that the point of progress? Every generation should make life easier for the next.

I don’t want to memorize faster or calculate quicker than a computer. That’s a race I’ll never win. Instead, I want to improve my creativity, the one skill computers can’t replicate. Tools like AI aren’t competition—they’re collaborators. They free us to think bigger and focus on what matters most: creating solutions that didn’t exist before.

3. Not Copying Smart People.

Copying isn’t only natural—it’s essential. You learned to speak, walk, and survive by imitating others. Copying smart people is how you speed up success.

Want what someone has? Repeat their habits. Avoid what others regret? Study their mistakes and do the opposite.

Copying with intelligence saves you decades of trial and error. There’s no point in wasting 40 years of your life trying to do the same things others have done before you.

• Copy what they’ve figured out
• Get the outcomes faster
• Figure new stuff out and make things easier for the next generations. Simple.

If you don’t seek to create your own curriculum, you will receive one. You’ll be living a life that has been lived millions of times by millions of people.

4. Not Questioning Authority.

In school, asking “Why?” can land you in detention. In life, it’s how you learn. Questioning assumptions saves time, money, and energy.

Rushing through tasks without asking why can cause rework and wasted effort.

Take time to pause, reflect, and question the process for better, faster outcomes.

5. Using Your Efforts as Justification.

School rewards effort—turn in your homework, and you’ll get points. Life doesn’t care how hard you try. If you miss the one crucial detail, your entire effort wastes.

Working hard for 100 years does not justify earning $1.

You could work like an elephant and eat like an ant, and complain.

But working hard does not mean you should get a dime.

How much you should earn is how much value you give, not how hard you work.

It's not whether you work hard or smart. What matters is; can you do the work "required."

The market rewards outcomes, not inputs.

6. Memorization.

“School rewards you for what you can remember. The market rewards you for what you can predict. The latter pays more.” — Alex Hormozi

Memorizing is storing data. Understanding is seeing how the data connects. It’s the difference between repeating a script and improvising a masterpiece.

Think about it:

• Memorization is fragile. Forget one step in a process, and you’re stuck. Understanding is robust—it adapts and improvises.

• Memorization is limited. Your brain has finite storage. Understanding compounds.

  
  

  When you understand, you are connecting things together. Once you remember one thing, you remember all the others because they’re connected.

  
  

  The more things you put on a todo list, the more likely you remember them. (They’re connected by the list). The more disconnected things you store in your brain, the more likely you forget them.

  
  

• Memorization is replaceable. Why memorize the periodic table when Google can recall it in seconds? Understanding makes you irreplaceable.

• Memorization feels like progress, but it’s fragile. Remember math class? Everything clicked until the pace picked up. You were memorizing formulas instead of understanding them. That didn’t end well. School rewards what you can remember. The real world pays for what you can predict.

7. Fear of Looking Stupid Because You Lack Knowledge:

When you're a beginner in a field, you will lack of fundamental knowledge. It can be frustrating—for both you and those you're trying to learn from.

You will be unconscious of your incompetence. This results to the embarrassment of asking dumb questions—I've been there, done that, and still do.

A few years back, I had the audacity to ask a Google employee if I could shoot an email to Bill Gates to sort out my Windows 7 activation key. I felt ashamed, but it serves as a reminder that even the pros were once clueless novices.

You need to ask questions to gain knowledge, even if they might be stupid.

There're things you'll only be able to learn/get from people, and you may need to approach them for this kind of things.

When it comes to reaching out to others for help, it's all about the give and take. People are more likely to lend a hand with tricky problems that offer some sort of mutual benefit. So, before you hit someone up for advice, think about what's in it for them?

Google or ask AI first. ChatGPT doesn't have better things to do.

Fear of looking stupid

It's normal. But here's the thing—owning up to your ignorance is the first step toward wisdom. Everyone starts out as a newbie. Exposing our lack of expertise is part of the journey to becoming an expert.

When you were a child, you would ask everyone lots of questions because you didn't care how dumb you looked. Until you went to school and people started laughing when you asked a dumb question in class. If you've stopped asking many questions, it's time to change your behaviour.

“Life Hack:

Keep a list of questions; you might get the opportunity to ask somebody that could change your life. The quality of the information you get is proportional to the quality of your questions. In the end, the outcome of your life depends on the information you come across and what you do with it. Expose yourself to more information. You will get more clarity from asking the right question…”

Are you afraid of reaching out to people because you might come off as dumb?

Lmao. If you do some self-relfection, the reason you're afraid is because you're dumb—in that topic.

Sooner or later, your lack of skill will reveal itself. You might as well expose it and learn.

8. Impatience:

Patience Isn’t Waiting

If patience simply meant waiting, it wouldn’t be a virtue—it would be a waste of time. Waiting without action isn’t patience; it’s stagnation.

True patience is about what you do in the meantime—how you use the waiting period to move forward, even if progress isn’t immediately visible. The best use of patience is to build towards the goal while the results unfold in their own time.

Patience becomes much easier when there’s a timeframe. A clear timeframe tells you what to do while waiting. Without one, uncertainty creeps in, and with it, the fear of missing out.

There was a problem in the U.S. where commuters complained about train delays. The expensive solution? Make trains faster—billions of dollars. The psychological solution? Install boards that showed estimated arrival times. Once people knew how long they had to wait, they stopped feeling impatient.

Now, apply this to learning.

The Struggle of Learning

When you're knee-deep in learning something new, impatience kicks in because the path to mastery is uncertain. You don’t know how long it will take to succeed because you don’t yet have the knowledge required. Ironically, once you do have the knowledge, you will have already achieved the goal.

If you think you know how to succeed but haven’t done it yet, the gap between your current state and your goal represents a knowledge gap. Every excuse you tell yourself about why you haven't succeeded is a pointer to what you still need to learn.

The key is to shift your focus:

• Instead of fixating on the destination, focus on the journey.

• Instead of getting frustrated about not being there yet, make the process rewarding (my level up planner is great for this).

• Learn to savor the small wins.

  
  

Success isn't just the outcome—it’s the uncertainty, the trials, the insights along the way. If success was guaranteed, where would the fun be?

Reading is Faster Than Listening

A friend once asked: "Do you learn better from books or videos?"

My answer? Books.

Reading is faster than listening. I enjoy videos and podcasts, but books force a deeper level of understanding. Understanding beats memorization.

With books, you control the pace—you can pause, take notes, reflect, and apply. With videos, you're constantly rewinding, trying to keep up.

My approach to reading:

• Find the core idea—most books stretch one key concept over hundreds of pages. Once I grasp it, I move on.

• If a book is truly great, I revisit it over and over rather than chasing 1000 mediocre books.

  
  

A lot of people read books like they watch movies—front to back, just to "finish." They brag about reading 100 books in a year, but what changed? Learning isn’t about stacking trophies—it’s about application.

If your study habits bore you, it's because you're not acting on what you learn. The brain isn’t wrong to resist pointless memorization.

The Formula for Patience in Learning

Be impatient with actions. Be patient with results.

• Take action immediately—don’t sit around waiting for perfect conditions.
• Accept that results take time, and focus on what you can do right now.

The journey is the destination.

9. Shiny Object Syndrome:

The Emotional Cycle of Change explains the emotional journey people experience when learning. It consists of five stages:

1. Uninformed Optimism: This is the honeymoon phase. You’re excited about learning the thing because you only see the potential rewards.

   
   

2. Informed Pessimism: Reality sets in. You realize the challenges, effort, and sacrifices required. Doubts creep in, and the initial excitement fades. This is where many people feel frustrated and overwhelmed.

   
   

3. Valley of Despair: The low point. Here, the challenges feel insurmountable, and quitting seems like the easiest option. This is the stage where most people give up.

   
   

4. Informed Optimism: If you push through the hard times, you develop clarity. You start seeing progress, gain confidence, and begin to enjoy the process again.

   
   

5. Success and Fulfillment: You master the new skill. The benefits of your perseverance pay off, and you realize it was worth the effort.

Why People Lose Compound Interest When They Quit at Informed Pessimism

1. Starting Something New: At Uninformed Optimism, you’re like someone planting a seed. You water it with enthusiasm and effort. Though the results aren’t visible yet, you’re setting the foundation.

   
   

2. Facing Challenges: At Informed Pessimism, people hit their first real roadblocks. This is equal to the seed sprouting underground—it’s growing, but you can’t see it. Many people quit here because the growth feels invisible. Even though progress is happening.

   
   

3. Quitting Too Soon: When people quit, they lose all the progress they’ve made. Imagine pulling out the seed before it breaks through the soil. They’ll never see the rewards of their initial effort. Growth requires time and consistency.

   
   

4. Compound Interest in Growth: Skills, habits, and progress work like compound interest. The longer you stick with something, the greater the rewards over time. Each small improvement builds on the last, creating exponential growth.

   
   

   • Quitting means you restart the cycle every time you try something new. This resets your “compound interest,” making long-term success impossible.

     
     

5. If you persist through Informed Pessimism, results begin to appear.

Example to Illustrate:

Let’s say someone starts learning a language.

• At Uninformed Optimism, they’re excited to learn vocabulary and imagine becoming fluent.

• At Informed Pessimism, they realize grammar rules are tough, progress feels slow. Motivation dips. If they quit here, they lose all the progress they made in building a foundation.

• By persisting, their sentences start flowing, and they see real progress. Over time, they’d gain fluency (Success and Fulfillment).

  
  

The Endless Loop of Quitting

You start something new, and it’s all fire. Motivation’s high, everything feels fresh, and you’re convinced this is it. Then you hit the Valley of Despair—where progress slows, excitement dies, and the grind actually starts.

This is where people break. Instead of pushing through, they start looking for the next shiny thing. A new project, a new tool, a new system—anything to recreate that rush of starting fresh. They jump ship, restart, and repeat.

But real progress? That happens after the Valley. If you’re always running from it, you’re not growing—you’re just looping.

10. Fear of Failure:

Getting things done is the best way to learn, but you can't get anything done without failing at first.

Failing is the only way to know the right thing to learn next.

Many people memorize and store facts and figures in their brain. Without ever putting it into practice. They know a lot, but they're still not intelligent.

They think if they stack enough knowledge, they won't make any mistakes and people won't laugh.

Your first attempt will always suck; you can make it suck less by doing it anyway and iterating.

11. Knowledge is not Power:

Knowledge alone won't get you what you want out of life (the ultimate test of intelligence). Knowledge is only leverage.

Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is leverage (it can only amplify power). Action is power.

Power is the distance between your thoughts and reality. To be more Powerful, shrink the gap between thinking something should be done and getting it done.

The only way to learn is to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Knowledge is only valuable when it's put into action. Otherwise, it's useless trivia cluttering up your brain.

Do you want to stack knowledge or do you want to stack results?

There's a popular saying in my environment that "no knowledge is waste." The effort you use to get knowledge would waste if you don't use it.

Random knowledge can help sometimes. But would you rather keep accumulating knowledge and hoping it comes handy? Praying that the knowledge you have will luckily make you successful. Or are you going to take active steps to make sure you're in control of your success.

Life is not a school exam where regurgitating facts and figures will earn you an A.

You're wasting time if you're studying anything you're not applying.

You need to do more, not know more.

Instead of picking out a new book, do what you read in the previous one.

Reading this article will give you information. Practicalizing the information leads to transformation.

Instead of learning without purpose, do this instead:

• Understand the fundamentals
• Outline a project to solve a problem you have, or basic stuff others are solving for starters.
• Start building the project
• Learn along the way

12. Pride:

When you are too eager to prove yourself, you will overlook crucial instructions. Don't rush to make a splash, make sure you can put your pride aside and learn.

You cannot impress a stronger person by showing how much you can lift, only someone weaker.

You cannot impress a richer person by buying expensive stuff. You'll only impress poor people.

You cannot impress a smarter person by talking too much, only dumb people.

You're spending your growth for the ability to show off.

You either gain progress or pride, you can't have both.

13. Inconsistency:

Most people are lazy and only do what they want when they want.

If you stop being consistent, you're reversing and wasting the effort you've put in the past.

The importance of consistency is to be trustworthy and to move faster. The more you do the thing, the more people believe you will continue.

When you’re not consistent, you’re controlled by entropy. and you’re creating more entropy.

Like a room that doesn’t get cleaned up for a day, a month, or a year. You can see the increasing difficulty in cleaning up the room.

14."I'm an Introvert":

I get this a lot: the ridiculous excuse that you're an introvert. That you cannot put yourself out there for opportunities to learn. Because it's your "nature."

Wrong, this is a bad behavior.

Socializing is a skill you develop, not a personality. Learning a creative skill isn't enough to become successful, you need to persuade.

You might have the best skill in something, but if people don't know you, it's useless.

If you don't get people to notice it, you can't give the value to anybody. People must like your surface before they'll care about your depth.

In the old days, for you to succeed, you'd need connections (obviously).

To get those connections, you needed to study hard and attend the best schools to meet the best people. You needed lots of money to travel long distances. You needed to see celebrities and successful people that may or may not listen to you.

You'd have to step out your comfort zone, work on your charisma and make yourself presentable.

Today, you can send any celebrity a DM. If your message is valuable, they’d see it and respond. If they don’t respond, you wouldn’t have wasted your life savings on traveling. You can iterate until you get attention. This is thanks to the internet. Unfortunately, some people don’t know—it’s almost as if they’re sleeping.

CONCLUSION

Instead of trying to figure out how to achieve a goal (how to learn in this case). Just list all the things that are making you not to achieve the goal (not to learn) and do the opposite.

We’ve listed some behaviors that are keeping you from learning. Do the opposite to learn.

Let me know what other behaviors hinder learning in the reply and comments.

Most people waste time learning things that won’t make them irreplaceable.

If you focus on the right skills, you can future-proof yourself and start earning with your mind.

I’m running a free cohort to teach creativity fundamentals. Writing (code, design, articles, media) that will actually make you valuable in today’s world.

If you’re starting from scratch and want to learn what matters, susbcribe to my newsletter: https://crive.substack.com, or hit the subscribe button on hackernoon so I can add you, and I'll send over the details.

P.S. Know other creators who could enjoy this? Share it with them - success compounds faster together!

Talk soon,

Praise